2017 July News – Hey Uber, Your Thinking Preferences Are Showing

25 July 2017 at 11:16 by Sarah Thurber

JULY NEWS 2017

Hey Uber, Your Thinking Preferences Are Showing

Last month, Travis Kalanick who started Uber in 2009, stepped down as CEO. Under his leadership, Uber had grown from an idea into a private company valued at $62 billion dollars. His aggressive, brash leadership style was legendary. And controversial.

In an International Business Times interview, FourSight Managing Partner, Sarah Thurber, talks about how Kalanick’s thinking preferences, left unchecked, may have created fault lines in his command that cost him the CEO role.

Moving Past the Scandals

Research from the FourSight database shows that startup companies like Uber are often led by people with a particular cognitive profile.

“From a cognitive perspective, they are irresistibly drawn to only two of the four stages of the universal creative process: Generating new ideas and implementing them,” she explains. However, they tend to ignore the other two styles of thinking – clarifying and developing.

“You can see all this playing out in Uber. The originators had this crazy vision of creating a company that could deliver a ride at the press of a button. And they created it,” she continues. “But they never built the HR structures that would sustain it and protect its employees. The fallout has been all kinds of reports about failures in HR, personnel and policy making. That’s not what Kalanick and his leadership team had their eyes on.”